My Week in Toronto

I spent last week in Toronto on business and I thought I’d share my impressions of the city with you. Toronto is obviously prospering. There’s lots of building going on and there’s a good amount of traffic on its well-maintained highways. It doesn’t have the frenetic quality I typically see in American cities.

A long time ago, possibly twenty years ago, I read an op-ed by a Canadian columnist in a U. S. newspaper that contained a passage that read something along the lines of this.

We could have had everything. We could have had British traditions, French cuisine, and American technology. Instead we ended up British cuisine, American traditions, and French technology.

In some ways that encapsulates not just Toronto but Canada more generally. Canada doesn’t have the enormous proliferation of fast food joints that the U. S. does and a Tim Horton’s is significantly better than a Subway. Building and road layouts had bafflingly poor designs.

All of the people I met were tidy, pleasant, and courteous if somewhat passive. Some remarked on my accent. By U. S. standards I have a neutral, sort of All-American accent. I grew up in St. Louis but have spent most of my adult life in Chicago. I’ve done substantial stints in the South, the Northeast, and overseas and my wife grew up in California. I’ve spent a lot of time among Brits. Although my dominant accent is Midwestern, I have Southernisms and Britishisms in my speech. In other words my accent is hard to place but it’s clearly a discernibly American accent.

Demographically, Canada is very different from the U. S. and becoming more so. In some ways it’s like using the Wayback Machine to visit Kansas in the 1960s. The people I encountered were overwhelmingly of European origin or descent. More of the people were of East Asian origin or descent than you would encounter here other than on the West Coast. I met very few people of sub-Saharan origin or descent and those were other guests in the hotel at which I stayed. I didn’t meet or even see a single person of Mexican or Central American origin or descent.

Travel is becoming harder for me than it used to be. I didn’t sleep well. On the plus side I ate fish every night I was there. There was a nearby restaurant where it was fresh, good, and reasonably inexpensive and my wife doesn’t care for fish so I took advantage of the opportunity.

The Toronto airport must be my least favorite among big city airports. For some reason it has only a fraction of the amenities that are common in big city airports. There are very places where you can get a bite to eat and you’ve got to walk substantial distances to reach them from the gates. The restrooms are small, few, and inconvenient.